As I continue to work on the new version of CFLib (and I promise this week I'll put the beta version up so folks can look at, and laugh at, my mistakes), I wanted to tackle a new problem that I was a bit unsure of how to handle.

Take a quick look at CFLib. Notice the layout doesn't change as you go from page to page. This layout was easily put into a view in the MG version. But notice the "pods" in the right hand section. By "pod" I mean each little box. This part confused me a bit. How could I get these guys into my layout?

I had already moved my layout to an event by itself:

This layout template simply checked the viewCollection for a value called body. Each of my events used "body" when doing their views. How then would I add in my pod? MG lets you stack views, allowing the later views to include the content from the earlier views. So if I wanted to simply include the HTML for the pods, it would be rather simple. I'd just add a new include tag.

However - I wanted to abstract the pod view as well. This turned out to be rather simple:

My search pod, for now, was rather simple:

Note the use of the viewState to set my title. This let me pass a title to my pod. So far so good. My pod view code had HTML and this:

<cfif viewCollection.exists("podbody")>
  #viewCollection.getView("podbody")#
</cfif>

Everything ran fine until I added another pod:

The first thing I forgot was the views with the same name will overwrite each other. So my 2 podbody tags would not work. The first thing I did was give better names to my two pods, "searchpodcontent" and "logonpodcontent". However, my view for th epod was still checking for "podbody". How could I tell my view what viewCollection to use? I then remembered that I could pass an argument to my views. I switched to this:

With me so far? My pod layout would simply check the viewState to get the name of the content to load:

So far so good. However, now I had a new problem. Both pods rendered. But the second pod had the right title and the wrong content. Turns out - I was thinking of the VALUE tag as an argument to a UDF - where it's really meant to set a value in the viewState data structure. Therefore, the value wasn't unique. All I had to was tweak the value tag to pass overwrite="true". And a big thank you to Joe R. for pointing that out to me. Here is the final version of the event from my MG xml file:

Now - some MG experts out there are yelling, "No Ray, there is a better way!" One of the things I love about ColdFusion is that there is always a better way. I've had a few suggestions sent to me, and later today I'll blog about them.